Hacking the Material World

Tunnellers are hacking the subterranean passages and hidden crawl spaces of colleges and universities across America – in a kind of urban spelunking that pits the true hacker's spirit of exploration against an unmapped and frequently risky landscape.

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Ask around in the right circles and you start hearing the stories. At Columbia University, forgotten corridors wind through the basement maze of a 19th-century insane asylum and past abandoned bomb shelters. At the University of Minnesota, an old network of hydro-electric tunnels connects with the university's own steam tunnel system. At MIT, freshmen meet in the dead of night to take something they call an Orange Tour, up hill and down dale along the school's domed roofs and into its labyrinthine sub-basements.

Across America, people are hacking their way through the underground passages and hidden crawl spaces of colleges and universities – a kind of urban spelunking that pits the true hacker's spirit of exploration against an unmapped and frequently risky landscape.

"Basically what you do is pick a building and go down to the lowest sub- basement and just start looking," says Patrick McCabe, who studied economics at Columbia in the mid-1980s. He found a way into the tunnels there after reading about the role they played in various student riots and sit-ins in the 1960s. "Usually you find a door that is locked, and you feel air coming through. And if you keep going back regularly enough, eventually you'll find the door unlocked because someone has been using the tunnels for maintenance."

The tunnels at Columbia skirt the entire perimeter of the uptown Manhattan campus, a surface distance of about three quarters of a mile. In his years of exploring, McCabe found graffiti and crates of supplies left over from the days when parts of the tunnels were set up as bomb shelters. Beneath Columbia's Maison Francaise, arched brick storm-drains from the last century lead into what was once an insane asylum. Tunnels into the sub-basement of the main library cross a midden of water- damaged books and folios.

"You saw lots of things that had been chucked out over the years," McCabe says. "It wasn't so much the physical geography as the history apparent there that really intrigued me."

McCabe's younger brother David and his buddy Norman Choe are active tunnelers at the University of Chicago, where they use an old archaelogist's trick to spot new spur lines. On snowy days, the warmth from the steam tunnels is enough to melt a telltale pathway on the surface above.

"We heard about the tunnels from friends who heard about them from other friends; it's pretty secretive," says Choe, a fourth-year biology major. "We've determined that tunnels go underneath just about the whole campus – maybe a mile altogether."

Chicago's tunnels range from cramped 4-by-4-foot shafts to room-size spaces full of boilers and steam-pressure equipment.

"The pumps scare the living daylights out of you when they turn on suddenly," Choe says. "We try to go down with at least two people; three is optimum. On nights when you're going out steam tunneling you get your flashlight and water bottles and vice grips and drive over to campus. You meet up, select a grate; sometimes you have to wait for security patrols to pass. It's like a military operation."

A single query posted on Usenet brought responses from tunnel hackers all over North America: at Reed College in Oregon, the California Institute of Technology, Rice University in Houston, State University of New York at Stony Brook, the University of British Columbia, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Cincinnati.

At MIT, where tunnelling and its attendant pranks are known simply as "hacking," unauthorized treks across the university's roofs are so common, the school has instituted a standard fine – $50 for most roofs, and $500 if you're unlucky enough to get caught on top of the Green Building, the tallest building on campus.

The tradition is well established at MIT, encouraged for years by the now-legendary Technology Hackers Association. Brian Bentz, the physicist and computer scientist who founded the group of high-tech pranksters in 1980, says the pastime ebbs and flows depending on student interests. In any given year there are probably 20 or 30 active tunnel hackers, with their activities falling into three broad categories: below-ground tunnelling, building interiors, and rooftops. Bentz calculates that at least half of MIT's hacking is done on the college's interconnected roofs.

David M., a third-year MIT grad student in electrical engineering, has been hacking MIT for seven years. He estimates that 70 or 80 percent of the school's undergrads at one time or another go on the organized Orange Tours to visit a number of MIT's more famous hacks.

"Those of us who've been doing it for a while take on undergrads as apprentices," says Equinox, who describes his hacks as urban rock climbing. "There are genuine risks. We explain about not putting your hand into machinery, in case it suddenly starts up. The nuclear power plant is somewhere you just never go. So is the medical building because of the animals there for AIDS research."

"There's a lot of interesting architecture at MIT," says Bentz. "And if you think about it in 3-D, you start to see parts of buildings that aren't apparent. That's where the shafts are, and the opportunities."

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